Microsoft has released a new DirectStorage 1.2 SDK (opens in new tab). And the biggest thing that happens with this update... It is an improvement in the way it works on hard drives.

There is a level of absurdity there that I absolutely agree with. But it makes total sense, and may in fact be the one thing that will encourage more game developers to jump on this feature ASAP. [DirectStorage is intended to leverage the power and performance of solid state drive technology in combination with modern GPUs to improve the performance of games that utilize DirectX-based technologies. The goal is to reduce load times, or eliminate load times altogether, and to reduce the CPU (open in new tab) load when moving data around in the system.

However, they do not work well on hard disk drives. [While SSDs have been available in gaming PCs for some time now, it is only in this generation that they are available by default in major gaming consoles. Since most game development is cross-platform, most titles needed to work well with older hard drive technology.

Today, that is less of an issue, and both the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 have DirectStorage analogs. In other words, now is the time to start making serious use of SSDs for gaming.

However, there are still many legacy machines that use hard disk drives, and developers will not want to cut off some of the potential users.

In response to requests from developers, Microsoft has added a feature to the DirectStorage 1.2 SDK called Force Buffered IO, which forces the use of buffered files. files open only in unbuffered mode, which is possible because the SSD interface is fast enough, meaning that there are no unnecessary copies of files taking up space in the system.

However, hard disk drives take longer to process, so copying files and holding them in buffers offers significant advantages. Therefore, this feature was added to DirectStorage to increase compatibility with traditional hard drives.

In theory, developers could simply enable DirectStorage regardless of whether users have older HDDs, eliminating the need to spend time coding legacy backups for systems using older media.

However, Microsoft is at pains to point out that DirectStorage is only for use with hard disk drives and it is the developer's responsibility to use it properly.

"When to use this configuration is the responsibility of the title," the latest Dev Blog states.

"This feature should only be enabled for slow HDD drives that can benefit from the OS's file buffering feature.

The only feature added to version 1.2 is the GetCompressionSupport API. This is purely a developer feature that makes the various compression paths used by DirectStorage and whether they are on the GPU or back to the CPU a bit more transparent.